“What went on in Georgia was mortifying,” he said in the new issue of Esquire. “White privilege and desperation and disaster … It came from a place of self-centered delusion … It was me trying to absolve myself of guilt for getting arrested.”

He candidly added, “I f–ked up.”

In July 2017, video of the 31-year-old screaming and cursing at police officers during his arrest was released.

LaBeouf, who was filming “The Peanut Butter Falcon” at the time, credits his co-star Zachary Gottsagen, a 32-year-old actor with Down syndrome, for changing his life.

“To hear him say that he was disappointed in me probably changed the course of my life,” LaBeouf told the magazine. “’Cause I was still fighting. I was still on my ‘Look how fast they released the videos! They don’t release these!’ Just on my defense-mechanism-fear garbage. And you can’t do that to him. He keeps it one thousand with you, and that s–t doesn’t even make sense to him. Zack can’t not shoot straight, and bless him for it, ’cause in that moment, I needed a straight shooter who I couldn’t argue with.”

He said that when he was younger, he overheard a man raping his mother, Shayna, and couldn’t do anything to stop it. His defensiveness and violence stems from the violence he witnessed toward his mom, he said.

“The first time I got arrested with a real charge, it stemmed from the same s–t,” he said. “Some guy bumped into my mother’s car with his car in a parking lot, and my head went right to ‘You need to avenge your mother!’ So I went after the dude with a knife.”

The attack against his mother was also the reason the actor now sleeps with a gun.